noggin's posts, page 108

Britbox UK - UK SVoD Platform.

Given that ITV and the BBC already run the BritBox joint venture - this makes sense.

One thing to keep an eye on is whether it will it 'just' be BBC Studios and ITV Studios content - or if the BBC and ITV have done deals with third-party production companies as well.

BBC News Scotland | News at Nine

No - the licence fee is going up in an attempt to keep up with broadcast inflation and help mitigate the massive real-world cuts to funding the BBC has experienced since the fee was frozen for a lengthy period and the BBC took on responsibility for funding S4C, World Service Radio, Rural Broadband and Local TV...

If the BBC also has to take on responsibility for fully funding licences for the Over-75s there will be huge cuts...

BBC iPlayer - Extended Availability Consultation

"if it wanted to"? If you mean "if the BBC wanted to" - that's the whole point of the consultation.

Remember the BBC is very heavily restricted in what it can currently offer on iPlayer due to it's service licensing arrangements with Ofcom, which are designed to avoid the BBC using its unique funding position to compete unfairly with commercial services.

What the BBC wants to do and what the BBC is able to do are two very different things. (Remember BBC One+1?)

X Factor

The same production company, the same team behind it. What were people expecting?

Eurovision 2019

No - San Remo is a festival in, and of, itself. Since Italy returned to the contest (after a long period of absence) the winner of San Remo is usually offered the opportunity to represent Italy (having one a prestigious domestic song contest), but there is no requirement for them to accept that offer.

BBC iPlayer - Extended Availability Consultation

I guess there are two major issues relating to archive content on iPlayer :

1. 'Distorting the market' - if the BBC makes archive content available to an audience free-of-charge, commercial operators who have paid to show that content on their platform may accuse the BBC of having their cake and eating it.

2. The cost of making archive available is still non-trivial, as original rights deals and contracts won't have included on-line provision, so you will either need to go back and renegotiate with the original rights holders on a show-by-show basis, or try and do a blanket deal with the major stakeholders.

BBC Three returns to TV on BBC One

This move makes total sense. In one of the DQF or PQF rounds the BBC decided to no longer commission original content for the 2230 (or was it 2300-2315) slots, with a few exceptions (the now-axed Film programme being one) The slots instead ended up being filled with repeats or extended versions of existing shows. (This was around the same time that BBC daytime moved from original commissioning to repeats of BBC One daytime shows, classic sitcoms and documentaries, and a morning of News simulcasts)

Broadcasting BBC Three 'new to linear' content in this slot solves two issues the BBC has I guess. It provides original (to the linear audience) content for BBC One and it provides a wider potential audience for BBC Three content (removing it from the semi-paywall of needing a data subscription to watch)

Sky News | General Discussion

Always remember galleries and gallery vision mixers can have multiple outputs - so you can key up a clock on one DSK but take a pre-DSK or DSK-clean feed of the mixer that won't have the clock on it.

With modern mixers you can upstream key differently on different mixer outputs too... (And although you don't see a vision mixer panel in the Sky gallery, there will still be an engine or crate doing the same things under automation control - the mixer panel is effectively just a keyboard...)

Or you can have a clean mixer output and then within the gallery (or between the gallery and TX) downstream key different graphics for different platforms, but with the same data controlling them (or different)

Eurovision 2019

I think you'd need to bump up the budget quite a lot... Greatest Dancer, X factor etc. all have Saturday night prime time BBC One/ITV budgets - and can spread the set design and construction costs, as well as lighting costs, over multiple broadcasts (economies of scale).

The economics of doing something similar for a one-off are very different - particularly in LH2 - which is neither a venue nor a purpose-built TV studio. (Ditto George Lucas 2)

This is why you don't see one-off shows in LH2 or George Lucas 2 - and instead see them in TC1, HQ1 etc., or from existing venues.

26th Anniversary of the biggest shake up in ITV

These days there aren't likely to be separate chipsets for different character sets - and multi-character set chipsets will be the norm. I think this has been the case since the 90s. (Cheaper to have one multi-standard design than different designs for each country - both in TV and chipset terms)

It may have been that early WST transmissions didn't transmit a character set flag and/or early receivers only had one character set in ROM (ISTR that German teletext on Astra 1 broadcasts displayed accented characters incorrectly on the late 80s TVs I was watching on) - so you had to have the correct chipset for display, but with the move to satellite TV and pan-European model designs, I'm pretty certain that the current spec includes character set flags (and has done for a while), and most receivers will cope with multiple character sets.

I know my Sony Level 2.5 (at least) decoder copes fine with multiple character sets (I've fed it all sorts of different nationality teletext content via both DVB-T and Analogue VBI and it's correctly handled it. It's also nice having more than 7 colours and less-blocky graphics when you feed it Level 2.5 stuff )

Eurovision 2019

New Melodifestivalen voting splits the app voting into 7 (I think) age bands with the phone voting as an 8th group.

All 8 groups have equal weighting going forward to the end result. So even if you got 100x as many votes from teenagers than all the other songs, if nobody else in the other age groups votes for you, you will come last...

Eurovision 2019

CuePIlot has largely been adopted by countries that don't have a history of music scripting and beat/bar counting. They had to invent CuePIlot in Denmark to get their version of X factor as tight as the UK version. The early versions of CuePilot weren't great either - with no beat detection and only second duration counting.

There is now a French rival, called LiveEdit, which is being used as well. (LiveEdit is also used for manual show script prep as it has similar functionality to that used for UK music scripting)

Countries that have always done scripted music with beat/bar counting (or those who have returned to it - like the US) are less likely to pay the extra costs to use CuePilot (it's not cheap). It also serves no real use on fully live music - so as a whole, isn't great for the industry.